By carefully analyzing the text-semantic features of the texts of Genesis 1-11, this book offers a quite new perspective on the primaeval history. The first part of the book examines Genesis 1-11, which is usually read as a creation story concerning the human being in relation to God, in which the human being falls from bad to worse. In these text-semantic studies it is shown that such is not the case, especially in the rather exciting analysis of the story of the Tower of Babel. In the second part of the book the methodological framework of these text-semantic studies is presented.

Biblical Hebrew grammar was until recently concentrated on the morpho-syntax within sentence boundaries. In the past few decades text-syntactic theories have been developed. At the conference Narrative Syntax and the Hebrew Bible (Tilburg 1996) six eminent scholars presented both a paper on Hebrew syntax and a workshop in which Exodus 19-24 or 1 Samuel 1 was studied. Both kinds of contributions are collected in this volume. They tend to lead towards one conclusion: traditional sentence-grammar and text-syntactic studies should not exclude, but include each other. The verb forms,...

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